Hipmunk takes hotel searching mobile

Ever arrived in a city only to realize that you’ve yet to book a hotel? Hipmunk, the San Francisco travel-search start-up, knows the feeling. The company released an update to its free iOS and Android apps this morning that allows you to book hotels anywhere you can connect to the Internet.

Using a phone or tablet, you can type in a location or just let GPS find you and show you hotels in the area. From there, the app shows you nearby hotels ranked by “ecstasy” — how much they cost, how well they have been reviewed on third-party sites, and how close they are to your current location.

The most intriguing part of the app for travelers may be its “heat maps” of topics travelers often care about. Tap “food” and the app shows you the neighborhoods with the highest concentrations of things to eat. “Sights” offers a guide to where tourist attractions are densest, and there are similar options to see shopping, nightlife and neighborhoods that are walkable.

Best of all is the “vice” heat map, which shows off neighborhoods dense with strip clubs, casinos, adult book stores and video shops, and sex toy shops.

“”It’s a good proxy for, ‘this neighborhood is bad,’ — for some people,” explained Danilo Campos, head of mobile efforts at Hipmunk, in an interview. “But we want to help all users, including those seeking vice.”

Campos tested the service out himself over New Year’s Eve weekend, taking CalTrain from San Mateo into the city and booking a room using Hipmunk once he arrived. The whole process took him five minutes, he said, and he had an enjoyable stay at the Hotel Stratford in Union Square.

“The choices for finding a hotel if you were away from your computer have been truly awful,” Campos said. “It came down to searching for a hotel in the maps app and calling each and every one to find one that was decent. So this is a huge bit of fantasy fulfillment for me — this is the tool I’ve been looking for.”

Hipmunk, which was co-founded in 2009 by the the creator of Reddit, is designed to improve on competitors like Kayak and Orbitz by offering a better user experience. It has no advertisements, for example, and shows search results in a visually appealing Gantt chart.